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sight. Not even a sheep.
    Jeff came around and stood in front of me. I looked up at him—up, because he was taller than me by about a head.
    His rat-like face broke into a grin. “I mean it,” he said. “I like you, Sam.”
    Then he punched me in the stomach—hard. Really hard. I gasped and lost my breath and bent over. Then I sank to my knees and gasped some more.
    “That was for hitting me,” Jeff said, standing over me. “I can’t just let that pass. You understand, right?”
    “Sure,” I managed to gasp after a second. “Sure, what’s not to understand?”
    Then Jeff reached down and grabbed me by the shirt collar. He hoisted me roughly to my feet. He slapped me twice in the face. It stung like fire and made me so angry I wanted to strangle him. But I managed to control myself because I didn’t want to die. Through tear-filled eyes I squinted at his blurred, grinning face.
    “Now that we got that out of the way,” Jeff said, “I think you and me are gonna be friends. What do you think about that? You want to be friends with me, Sam?”
    I gasped a few more times before I got my breath back. Then I thought about it. I thought: Well, why not? Friends with Jeff Winger. That could actually be kind of interesting .
    So after a second or two, I said, “Okay. Sure.”
    And that was the stupidest thing I ever did.

4

Preacher’s Kid
     
    Here’s what you have to understand: I’m a PK, a preacher’s kid. My dad, Matthew Hopkins, is the rector of East Valley Church, which is on Washington Street, which is in our town, which is Sawnee, which is a small place of about seven thousand people in upstate New York. And see, when you’re sixteen and your dad is a preacher—and you live in a small town so everybody knows who he is and who you are—there’s a lot of pressure on you. It’s not that anyone expects you to be perfect or anything. You don’t have to be brilliant. You don’t have to be an athlete. You don’t have to get great grades in school. All you have to do is—well, nothing. Or nothing wrong, that is. You can never, ever do anything wrong. Ever. Other kids can get into trouble, get sent to the principal’s office, get a little wild sometimes. But not you, not the PK. See, people like to gossip about the preacher. Since he’s always reminding them to be moral and good, they get kind of a thrill out of it when they find out his life isn’t perfect. And if you—the preacher’s kid—get in trouble, everyone will start whispering to one another: Did you hear about the preacher’s kid? Tsk, tsk, tsk, Reverend Matt’s boy has really gone off the rails . . . It makes your father look bad. It makes your mother upset and angry. And it makes you feel like the worst person on earth. Trust me on this.
    So, on the one hand, there’s all this pressure to be good. But then, on the other hand, you don’t want to be too good. You don’t want to be so good you can’t be . . . well, ordinary. One of the guys. You don’t want the other kids to feel like they have to fall silent whenever you walk by or stop telling the joke they were telling or say “Excuse me” to you after they curse or something as if you were their maiden aunt and had never heard a bad word before.
    It can be a problem. Like, with girls, for instance. I can’t help noticing that a lot of the girls in school are very polite to me. I mean, very polite. Extra polite. Too polite. Like I’m their best friend’s little sister or something. Like I’m their mother’s good china and they want to be careful not to break me. Now and then, for instance, I’ll be looking at a girl . . . Okay, specifically I’ll be looking at Zoe Miller. Because I have what is technically called “a major thing” for Zoe Miller. Because Zoe Miller happens to be insanely cute and nice. She’s got this short black hair and these big green eyes and this pug nose with freckles on it and this smile that makes you feel like she really means it. And the